A Beautiful Little Farm for rent

Have you ever wanted to wake up early in the morning knowing the only place you had to go or do for the day was right in your own back yard.  You hum as you dress for the day in your cutoff overalls and floppy straw hat, or maybe you wear a skirt and an old comfy t-shirt with a bright retro apron tied over top.  Grabbing the milk pail, you head out the door just before sunrise and breath in the crisp, fresh morning air.  The next few hours are spent milking the dairy goats, picking greens for the hens, turning on the water to the garden and weeding or harvesting.  The afternoons are filled with making cheese or spinning the wool from the multi-colored Jacob sheep, drying or canning the bounty harvested from the garden.  A basket sits by your favorite chair filled with homesteading books and magazines, and a half finished pair of knitted socks waiting for you when you have a minute to sit and relax.  Each day is filled with the wonder of growing your own food, and having enough to sell at the local farmers markets.  Yes, it is a beautiful little farm and it is available for rent.

Rent for the 2 bedroom mobile home and 3 acre farm is $695.00 a month

this includes a large 24x48 greenhouse

a 12x 20 greenhouse

3 chicken coops and runs (enough room for about 150 hens)

you must provide all of your own equipment, shovels, tillers, hoses, sprinklers, etc.

only organic growing methods may be used

all our animals will stay on the farm , we provide the feed

references and deposit required

come walk the gardens and see if this is the place for you

No, I am not retiring even though I am re ally tired.
(not as young as I think I am)

I still have several acres of garden at the little red house
and will be putting in gardens up North this next year also



Egyptian Walking Onions

The Egyptian Walking Onion also goes by many other names:

Winter Onion

Tree Onion

Top-set Onion

Traveling Onion

are just a few of the many names it is known by,

but no matter what it is called it belongs in every cottage garden.

The Egyptian Walking Onion is a perennial.  That means the bulb will survive through the winter and send out new growth in the spring.  The onion will continue to grow and in late summer tiny onions develop at the top of a long hollow stem. 

Here are my suggestions for planting, harvesting and using the Egyptian Walking Onion. 

  Plant top-sets in late summer, break off the individual, small, new onions and plant the bulb entirely underground leaving the green leaf above ground.

Cover well with mulch, and in the early spring the tiny bulbs will begin to grow.  All parts of the onion can be used.....bulb, stems or leaves.  (I only eat these onions in the early spring)

Harvest the (underground) onion bulb before it sends up the long, hollow stem that supports the

 new onion top-sets, because the onion will become pithy, and not palatable, as the energy goes into producing the new bulbs and root division.

If left in the ground to mature, it will send up a long, hollow stem that the top-set onions form on, and the bulb will divide underground.  The underground bulbs can also be divided in the late fall, separated and planted out individually.

 

These onions are not winter/storage onions.

If you dedicate a corner of your garden to the onions, they will take care of themselves, you can even neglect to replant them in the fall.   The tall hollow stem the top-sets grow on eventually falls over due to the weight of the forming bulbs and "plants" itself and the whole process begins again.  Just keep well watered and mulch in the fall and you will always have a ready supply of tasty onions.

 

I will have top-set bulbs for sale at my booth

Saturdays, in the IFA parking lot

Cedar City

come get some to plant in your garden

Rhubarb

This spring, in early MAY,  I transplanted Rhubarb from the little red house down to the farm.

Generally it is recommended by.... (quite frankly I don't know whom)..... to wait until the second year

to harvest lightly and then the third year it is ready for a heavy harvest.

Well, I am too impatient to wait for three years so I harvested some for market today.
 No I did not wait for 2 or 3 more years, why?

 

Let me explain,

I lined the path to the greenhouse on both sides with the small pieces of root mass from the parent plants.  Added some  Gourmet Goat Garden Garnish ,  that we age and compost down for several years,  and then covered with hay the picky goats refused to eat.

Watered well and this is what happened.

 

 

Looks like an ordinary rhubarb leaf, but sometimes looks can be deceiving.......

I wanted to show you a picture of how large they had grown, but the picture didn't do it justice.

 

 

so I put my square, stubby fingered, farmer's hand in the photo to help

you get a perspective of the size of the plants, but that still didn't give you an accurate account

of the growth......so I used my favorite measuring tool that I always carry with me.....

 

My Shoe!

 

If you will recall from earlier posts it is often found sitting on squash or other vegetables

to help you see the growth and progress of the vegetables here at our little farm.

 

Yep, I will be picking Rhubarb for market and CSA shares

over the next few weeks, not in a couple of years from now!

 

 

 



Farm Fences

 

A farm fence always tells a story.  Here are a few of ours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grasshoppers

Grasshoppers, grasshoppers, a flyin' in the air.

Grasshoppers, grasshoppers, are crawling in my hair.



Grasshoppers, grasshoppers, stickin' to  my clothes.

Grasshoppers, grasshoppers, a clingin' to my nose.



Grasshoppers, grasshoppers,..... get me out of here!

Grasshoppers, grasshoppers, not til the job's done, I fear.


GRASSHOPPERS,  GRASSHOPPERS

 in the air,

GRASSHOPPERS,  GRASSHOPPERS

 in my hair,

GRASSHOPPERS,  GRASSHOPPERS

 in my cloths, and

GRASSHOPPERS, GRASSHOPPERS

 on my nose.

GRASSHOPPERS, GRASSHOPPERS,   EVERYWHERE!

GET ME OUTA, OUTA, OUTA,  HERE!




If  Willy Nelson was a rapper I would give him the permission to record this and give the proceeds to the society against grasshoppers .......if there is one...........if not lets' make one!

 The year of the grasshopper was a disaster.  Every where you looked the hoppers were munching away at the new growth on every one's farm.  You would walk and the ground would move under your feet in tiny waves of brown, spotted, clicking, hoppers.  We had spent the long, hot, summer days on the ditch bank and in the fields with shovel in hand smashing the ugly, jumping insects until our shovels were covered in a thick, blackish-brown, tar-like slime.  The grasshoppers were different than the hordes of crickets we sometimes get.  The hugh crickets eat and migrate on, where-as the grasshoppers eat, lay their eggs in the farm dirt, eat until they die and the cycle starts over.

It was in the early seventies.  My younger sister and I were cutting the hay fields.  We used an old New Holland, 8 foot head, open (no cab or roof) swather.  I loved driving that little machine.  It had  two stick handles  to drive it.  Push both handles to engage it to go forward , pull back to stop while using the  brake pedal.    If you wanted to turn left, you would apply the  brake,  pull the left stick back while pushing the right stick forward.  Vice-versa for a right hand turn.  Man, that swather could turn on a dime!  Ya, it would spin in a circle too!-----DON'T TELL MY DAD

Cutting a 100 acre patch of hay would take 3 to 5 sun up to sun down days.  We had several hundred acres to lay down that year. As we  swathed through the hay, the grasshoppers would fly up from the ground just high enough to land directly on us as we drove down through the fields.  Grasshoppers have barbs on their feet that attach and hold fast.   UGH..............they would land on us and begin crawling on our skin or in our hair.  The most disturbing were the ones landing on our faces and crawling in our ears.  Trudy and I would take turns, each of us cutting as long as we could stand the bugs.  Finally after days and days the cutting was done.   BUT........along comes Uncle Leo who had a section he needed cut and would the "girls" be willing to cut it.  (Uncle Leo had about 5 boys who could of cut his field, but for some reason us girls got to do it.)  The grasshoppers were extremely thick at his field.  They flew up in a thick cloud and landed all over us.  It was awful!  To this day I loath, no that is not a strong enough word, I HATE grasshoppers.  ( I obviously have a liking for crickets however)  In fact I dislike  grasshoppers so much they have a bounty on their heads at the farm. " Spare no mercy!" I inform the kids.  I still shutter today when I hear the click-a-ty-clack of a flying grasshopper............
                                    and I grab my shovel and start swinging!

Farm Babies

Western King bird or as we call it around here

Fly Catcher

This mama was carrying her brood around on her back

 when my son discovered her and scooped them up and put them in the jar

(just long enough to show me and then I made him promptly let them go---far, far away....)

A young fledgling dove that was raised over head of my sun room office

newly hatched chicks--odds are they will all be cockerels

(my babies now all grown and flown the coop)

robins

first steps

horned toad

adorable baby cotton tail rabbit-----until they start munching the lettuce and beans---

then they aren't "so cute"

a new batch of "Poly-frogs" as we call them here at the farm

sunning themselves on a rock

the toads are raised in the small pond at the little red house and then transferred

to the greenhouses and gardens

A Day to Celebrate

Today I want to say just a few words

 about this wonderful country we live in.....

A land of refuge,

a privilege of freedom, 

the blessing of choice.

The right to have pride in one's community,

and the opportunity to make it better

by being an active citizen and contributing good

  through hard work, honesty, and integrity.

 By appreciating the beauty around us,

 respecting and honoring the bounties of the earth,

we can make a difference. 

I am grateful for those who have sacrificed for my freedom.

In return I will  appreciate:

  opportunities I am given,

 the right to Worship,

my home,

 the land I farm,

 and the privilege to make

choices.

I AM

 ( blessed, grateful, proud, honored)

 TO BE AN AMERICAN

5 Reasons

I'll   NEVER have one of those fancy-smancy, cutsie-wootsie, adorable, blogs about gardening like so many talented people have.   Not going to happen around here, and here are my 5 good reasons why I won't.

#1.  I don't have time, instead of spending a little, short amount of time in a postage-stamp size garden (something I will some-day have if I can figure out how to only plant 3 Zucchini plants instead of 800),  I am spending all my time in my  acres and acres of garden and so little time on the computer.  Instead of writing (well maybe I do a little) about gardening, I am out puttering (which involves lots and lots of work) in the garden.

#2.  I don't know how, you see I belong to the over the hill gang.  I barley could sit through a half year of type while I was in High School.  It was more than I could handle sitting on that hard chair with my feet placed just so, my back straight, and my neck cranked to one side to see the word's in the bright orange,odd shaped type book.  The constant click, click of the typewriter keys and mumbling under my breath when trying to go too fast and the key bars would become a jumbled mess, and worst of all was the constant ding as you came to the end of the row.  Ding, reach up and catch the lever that advances the crisp, white sheet of paper, and sends the roller in the opposite direction, all while trying not to knock the whole heavy apparatus off the table.  And if you made a mistake, well just too bad, either white it out or start over with a new sheet of paper.  Whew, I got out of that class as soon as possible.  (And to think my mother wanted me to be a secretary).  Computers weren't even invented back then.... 

#3.  I have lousy Internet service,  not anyone's fault but the W-I-N-D-'S.  It blows a hundred miles and hour out here and just blows away my signal along with the neighbor's cat!  My cell phone doesn't work half the time either, so if it is important to contact me, you better send along a letter, I check the mail at the corner, a couple of miles away, at least once a month!

#4.  I ain't smart, or beautiful and would rather tax my brain on something more interesting, like how do I keep the mice out of the little red house, or trying to out smart the chipmunks who insist on eating all my squash seeds after they are planted and germinate.  (Which I did with just a 5 gallon bucket full of water) 

#5.  I just don't wana,  there are to many places to discover,  trails to hike, painting's to paint, seeds to plant, weeds to pull, rows to water, veges to harvest and put up, and sunsets and sunrises to watch.  So folks, you'll never see any of that fancy-smancy stuff here.  NO-SIREE!
OH, I guess I do have one more reason:
#6.  My final reason, I just don't wana because, I don't know how, and I ain't smart enough to figure it out.    My internet service is lousy, and I just plain don't have the time.